Brian’s got a very interesting post on Abject Learning concerning Twitter, Tumblr, Tumblog, and other new hyperconnected picocontent generators.

I left this comment, but it grew so long that I figured I’d just post it here.

Two quick and quixotic thoughts:

Nicholas of Cusa argued that it would be philosophically impossible to distinguish between a top rotating at infinite speed and a top standing still. In some respects, once hyperconnectivity exceeds a certain threshold, it not only has diminishing returns, but begins to turn into an accelerating disconnection. It’s a paradox, like alterity–but George has already heard some of what I think about connectivism.

No, I don’t know what that “certain threshold” is. I’m just musing about the value of disconnection, perhaps because every disconnection reveals other connections that may have gotten lost or overwhelmed or drowned out. But of course the answer is not to pursue hyperdisconnection, either, as many do who resist life online.

Second: not too long ago I read a Scientific American article in which cognitive psychologists investigated the formation of symbol-competence in children. What did it take for a child to learn that a picture of a box of popcorn would not spill popcorn into his lap if she held the picture upside down and shook it? There were two answers. One was that the competence was age-dependent. The other was that a certain inhibitory function had to be learned. In other words, there needed to be a gap between the visual stimulation and the motor response (and, presumably, the cerebration) so that the kid would not jump to the wrong conclusion about the picture (it’s a box of popcorn!) and grab it but would have time to come to the right conclusion (it’s a picture of a box of popcorn).

It seems to me that the next layer of thought in this whole shebang will have to account for connectivity, barriers, inhibition, and instant access as multidimensional, dynamic, and dynamically related (and necessary) ingredients of a complex model of cognition and education.